Emily Blunt has been a certified movie star for quite some time now, with numerous memorable performances under her belt. However, it seems like we might get to see yet another side of the actress when her latest film with Dwayne Johnson, the upcoming biopic The Smashing Machine, hits the 2025 movie schedule in October. Blunt will portray the girlfriend-turned-wife of Johnson’s real life UFC fighter, Mark Kerr, and she’s gotten real about the intensity involved in playing her character.
What Did Emily Blunt Say About Her Role In The Smashing Machine?
We’ve seen Emily Blunt play a bitchy fashion magazine assistant (a role she’ll reprise in a 2026 movie, the long-awaited The Devil Wears Prada 2), an adventurous woman on a Jungle Cruise (her first film with Dwayne Johnson, which has its own stalled sequel), and the wife of a famous physicist for the mega-hit Oppenheimer (which earned her an Oscar nomination) and many more parts during her two plus decades on the big screen. Apparently, though, no role quite compares to Dawn Staples, whose real story she will help tell in the upcoming A24 movie, The Smashing Machine.
As the woman who was in a relationship with Mark Kerr during his rise to fame as an MMA fighter, Staples forms a large part of his story as his profile grew and led him down a tumultuous path that included addiction. While speaking to Net-A-Porter about working on the film, Blunt opened up about the difficulty of playing someone in the “cage” of addiction with their struggling significant other, and said:
I was very challenged by playing someone who didn’t seem to be the movie version of the girlfriend, and this didn’t seem to be a movie version of a relationship. It was the full weather system. You know you’re gonna have to rip your rib cage open on something like this, and it’s quite scary to put your feet to the fire: am I gonna do it justice?
I don’t know if I ever would have described any bit of dealing with emotional trauma, even that of loving someone who’s in the throes of addiction, as having to “rip your rib cage open,” but it definitely paints a vivid picture of the work Blunt had to do and the life that Staples lived while she was with Kerr.
Possibly not so coincidentally, when Johnson talked about having wanted to “do something raw and gritty” by the time this role came around, he also admitted to a desire to “rip” himself “open” on screen and show people that he can deliver more than a typical muscle-bound hero. Blunt continued, with more on how hard this role was for her, and added:
And the other fear is that these people are still living, and you’re holding the beating hearts of their lives on a screen. You just want to do right by these people who have lived through a lot.
The Edge of Tomorrow star did get the chance to speak to the real Dawn Staples, and with early reviews praising the film, Blunt’s work, and the “scarily unstable” performance of Johnson, it sounds like all of their rib cage-ripping work really did pay off.
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